Mapped: Wind Energy in Texas

August 19, 2013 | 1:35 PM

Drive west from Austin or Dallas-Fort Worth towards cities like Midland, Amarillo, or El Paso, and you’re bound to see your share of wind turbines dotting the landscape.

That’s because Texas leads the nation in wind capacity, and more wind farms are on the way. That’s reflected in this map, which shows each county’s annual wind energy production in gigawatt hours. (One gigawatt hour is enough to power 200,000 Texas homes during peak summer energy demand, and many more than that during cooler times.)

Photo by UPI/Pat Benic/LANDOV

Texas has more wind energy than any other state.

It’s important to note that the values for this map are not exact. The data comes from The Wind Power, a wind industry website, which maintains a database of every wind farm in the world. While the group records the county and annual production of each wind farm, some farms span multiple counties, which means that some production data had to be approximated. Still, this map is a reasonably accurate representation of where Texas’ wind production is coming from.

Even though Texas is the nation’s wind leader, only 46 of its 254 counties are wind producers. The vast majority of these are found in West Texas and the Panhandle, although coastal counties like Kenedy and Willacy are also represented. Wind farms along the Gulf Coast might become more prolific in the future as companies continue to develop onshore wind, and look to offshore wind capabilities as well.